Some people are quite charitable and give 10%. I'm a little more selfish and give 1.5%, but this is already currently helping people.
Is it really pie in the sky idealism if (statistically) I've saved around 6 lives to far, (and helped many more). Still early in my career, and lots of time to go. I hope to cross 100 someday. But I started just as I graduated and have kept it up every year.
So I suppose the next question in my rebuttal would be to ask what alternative you suggest?
According to [1] OECD average is 36 %. In my EU country it is 46 %.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-brochure.pd...
"It's also bogus: not many can become rich"
All these points are far from obviously true. In fact I can come up with many examples where they obviously are not.
Regarding (2) - There are examples of successful EA in action. See the FTX founder.
Regarding (3) - Getting rich can't make people poorer (on net) unless you're exploiting negative externalities, which we would both agree need to be addressed by government. It can transfer wealth from A to B (e.g., by deprecating one industry and replacing it with another), for sure, but I don't see that as automatically bad.
You mean, the easiest ways to get rich? You have to be pretty principled not to take those.
That said:
>Who cares if it's more self serving as long as they do get the the second part?
People like me, who don't consider it being altruistic or not as orthogonal to the success of the second part.
Are you using 'orthogonal' to mean "unrelated to", or do you mean "in opposition to"?
Because depending on which meaning you intend, your final sentence can be read in two very different ways. If it's the first, I'm not completely sure you and fighterpilot are necessarily disagreeing? If it's the second meaning, then it's a somewhat bold claim to say that personal benefit in any form invalidates altruism.
>Are you using 'orthogonal' to mean "unrelated to", or do you mean "in opposition to"?
I'm using it to mean "unrelated to" (canonical CS meaning of "orthogonal" as well).
But, here's the catch, note that I used a double negative in my phrasing. so, I'm not saying they are othogonal, I'm saying they're not orthogonal. That is, I don't consider "being altruistic or not as orthogonal to the success of the second part" (the second part being the "helping" we were discussing).
So, it's not that "personal benefit in any form invalidates altruism", it's that lack of altruism works against effectivly helping people.
Yes, uninvested wealth is zero sum (cash and cash equivalents) and that is why we have inflation, but invested wealth can be positive sum.
If you use your uninvested wealth to invest into a poor country then you end up doing more good than bad.
The modern world compared 1700 is a great example on joe wealth can (but doesn’t always, see Saudi Arabia) benefit all.
Other times the scheme is just cheating people or restricting their access to hoarded limited resource.
The “a lot” came from the search results for “gates oxford covid patent” (I'd've expected people arguing against it if there was contention in opinion – this isn't the same as “it's fact”), though further investigation (the thing I didn't do; sorry) reveals that I only found two other articles: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/02/09/patent-capital-... and https://criticallegalthinking.com/2021/02/09/patent-capital-... the rest of the results are mirrors.
You're right that it's a rubbish thing to write; I'll put more effort into comments in future.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/02/...
MS. GATES: Well, we, along with many other partners, supported Oxford in saying what really needs to have happened there, they had incredible science, but they had never brought a vaccine to market. And so, they needed to partner with a pharmaceutical company who had expertise bringing a vaccine to market. And so, it was us and many partners that said that's a partnership that ought to happen. Ultimately, Oxford made that decision.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/02/...
The high corporate savings rate of the last decade tells us that most of that money is just sitting somewhere doing absolutely nothing.
It's also more self-serving for the better part of it (as your focus is to become rich), and might never reach the second part (actually becoming rich and helping others).
It's also bogus: not many can become rich, both for reasons for circumstance making from much harder to nigh impossible for billions, and also for purely logical reasons: wealth is relative, and if much bigger numbers of people were rich, it would get lost to inflation.
So this effectively gives a pie-in-the-sky idea for what to become and when to help, to most people, as opposed to encouraging them to help dozens (or just a few) here and now.